Skip to main content

3rd And 4____Still Loving the NFL

 


3rd And 4—Still Loving the NFL

I’ve been watching Professional American Football games since the end of 1966. No, not with my dad. But I started watching those games with my older brother. Why? Because it was Wicked Man! Like Cool! And only the cool people knew just how cool it was.

If you couldn’t sit there and watch a bunch of guys go head-to-head for your entertainment; then who were you anyway? So, we’d thought. My mother was a ‘real’ girl. She wanted nothing to do with such violence. My dad barely watched NFL games. And for some reason he’d preferred watching Professional Ice Hockey games. I’ll say it was to see an unscheduled fight break out. Because he thought that was how ‘real men’ acted.  You didn’t take a shove on the chin. A real man let it bother him and subsequently took care of business by retaliating with brute force. So, it seemed his thinking.

My brother and I loved the NFL games. We’d watch them, then we would apply the plays we witnessed to our unorganized football game’s plays. We’d get about eight or more guys together and play pick up football games on a Saturday and sometimes on a Sunday too. It was a good time and place to rough-house without Mom hovering around us. If she’d ever witnessed us doing this—it indeed would have freaked her out.

The risks you’d take on 3rd down and 4 yards to go, were incalculable. When that time came, my brother would become Daryle Lamonica, a.k.a. the Bomb. For there were no first downs on the merely fifty yards or so field size we’d played on. Each team got four downs per possession to get a touchdown. There were no three-point field goals. Nor were there the extra points kicked and tallied up. Back then, ‘No Roughing the Passer’ didn’t exist. It was sort of like—Kill the Guy With the Ball. Which truly made it more entertaining. That was because my brother was super-fast. Unlike me, my brother received all the fast genes from any of our ancestors who had them.

And the only things that were fouls were: Offsides, Holding defense against offense lines and visa versa, punching, tripping, kicking your opponent. And if we’d included a count of four Mississippi due to not enough players; then we had penalties for that violation as well. And the one steadfast rule—You didn’t complain about something frivolous like your new knit sweater getting stretched out because it was the only way to grab you in a tackle. Once you whined or fussed over something frivolous, not letting it go after two mentions. Basically, you were considered the ultimate pussy and weren’t invited to play in future football games. Cause man, how could you be a professional football player like us?---Jody-Lynn Reicher

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

It Follows Me...

One may wonder what would inspire someone to work hard labor voluntarily. For me it’s the love of many things. It’s the passion that won’t be broken. Because there are so many aspects to such service for me, that it may seem beyond comprehension. I’d compare it to my youthful desire to enter the military as a young child. Then for a multitude of reasons only to follow through thirteen years later at age eighteen entering the Marines. There were things that followed me throughout my life. Sometimes they were questions of how I ever gave up my over decade’s life dream to become a New Jersey State Trooper. My childhood desire to never wed—to never have any serious relationships with another human being. I desired only service in military and law enforcement nearly my whole childhood. Too the extent that even one of my Marine Corps superiors expressed to me last July, “I never thought you’d ever get married. It just wasn’t who you were. You were always a loner.” I replied, “Yeah. I know.

Sledging the Hammer

  "You could have a steam trainIf you'd just lay down your tracks..."---Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' lyrics. This is not the tune that lay in my mind this morning as I reminisced about yesterday's volunteers to help on trail crew.    However, as I looked up the proper definition of sledging that song popped up. I say sledging, which is my own take on swinging a hammer that we call a "Double Jack". The Single Jack is six pounds. I know that because our regular crew of five including me and one staff supervisor are handling Harriman State Park Trails, and have to carry about four of those, two shaping hammers, along with a hoist, belay bag with heavy equipment, first aid kit, double Jack, three 18lb rock bars, a lopper, three buckets, three eye to eyes, two burlap straps, two green wrapping straps, two pick Mattox, a roe hoe or two, a bar for either the two ton or one ton hoist, the feathers with pegs for splitting rocks that we drill... s

Death in the Distant Future...

  Death in the Distant Future… Or at least that is what its supposed to be. We don’t suppose people should die at a certain age. We will witness suffering; but we know it gets better. So, we’ve been told. Or so, we have hope that it will. There are instances of mass tragedy. Sometimes we call that war—maybe insanity—perhaps terrorism… We have names for it, that type of death. Then there are the terminals. Things we think we can control—once we know the enemy within.   Or things we follow, pray for, aim for. We hold hands for it. Or we choose to suffer with the suffering because it matters. And it doesn’t matter how it matters. Then there is some form of Universal Order. A tainted weird line of fate. Perhaps mathematically calculated in everyone’s existence. No matter how great, how menial a life on earth may appear there’s a geometric wave—a pattern. We can involve other mathematical ideologies—Fibonacci, perhaps. And each of our lives are formulas. Formulas appearing misundersto